kinaesthesia!

I have been thinking again about this issue of confidence after a few more emails from other traceuses via the net. One thought is it can be intimidating to consider if you can 'replicate' a particulary impressive move that you have seen someone else doing. Recently I have been trying to bear in mind is that how something looks and how something feels is very different and my current plan of listening to the movement from the inside and less watching it from the outside has been helping, especially as my level of anxiety jumping over things is lower. Yes!...i can safely say at times i'm 'breezing ' over things !. Its significant that before Parkour was as widepread as it is now, people learned from videos on the net and so if you are making a video you are going to 'display' movements that come across strongly in a visual medium. To much focus on the visual element can overule the kineasthetic element which is actually where the fun is at. At the moment I am instead thinking that every move from the start of the route to the end is as important as the next, from the very first subtle shift on weight to move forward to the moment you come to a stop. It feels safer too...:.)!

Slow burn.

I have recently done a total 180 change in attitude from the one I had when I first began this blog. It's coming up to 11 months since I first attempted Parkour. I'm not counting the Benny Hill style incident involving my flatmate and I and a brick wall and a tree that occured after watching Jump London on T.V. 'Attempting' Parkour was the phrase I spied in my hospital notes as the reason for my hand injury which stung slightly but that first post Jump London debacle was indeed a dismal attempt.

On Thursday I got over a 10ft wall. I could go into detail (wall surface, width of ledge blah blah blah) but instead I state that never ever ever pre January 2008 would I have been able to get over that. That's the beauty of structured training, you can't help but improve. Often if you ask a traceur how long they have been practising they will answer like a child or a recovering alcoholic: knowing exactly how many months it has been since their life turned a new corner. Similarly they will often make a distinction between when they 'played' at Parkour and when they 'got serious' and the structure began.

11 months ago after the passion was ignited and an idea for a once a week bit of Parkour fitness turned to an obsession, the desire to improve exploded and I began to get ambitious. Phrases like 'be able to do', 'achieve', 'get good' filled my vocabulary. I relished conditioning to agony as it felt like a passion that intense could only be aserved through a baptism of fire and I wished it could be more intense...to suffer everyday so I could be sure of 'getting there'...to my ambition. I was frequently scared, then high from adrenaline....and babbling like a idiot. Its a wonder all the people who i trained with then and who I now consider friends managed to put up with it.

In place of the single mindedness is now opposition to the struggle and a little also to the structure. The part of my life where i played was brief...I quickly got into dance...very structured and became a teenage girl...self censoring and cautious. Play itself is often inherently structured anyway motivated by intrinsic goals rather than external ones. So now i find that although I keep counting the months i'm not trying to keep track of the path so rigidly and just seeing where it goes.

A question.

I posted this on the Pk gen discussion board....I'm curious as to the responses...

if Parkour is a creative art...generative, sustainable, organic why do we have a culture that trains as if we are going to war...hierachical, unforgiving, militant?...

is it the only way to be strong enough to do what Parkour demands?

Structure and logic plus moaning about the weather.

Yesterday, struggling back through London with my parkour burkha in position (1 hat, 2 hoods,and fleece zipped to the eyeballs) I started to wonder what possessed me almost a year previously to go out into this hostile wilderness and start Outdoor Parkour classes?. Looking at sleet dripping off the railings (and also wouldyoubloodybelieveit snow!), the improbability of a fluid and economical motion passing over them (steady now not that kind of motion :.))was not only unlikely because of slippage and that unpleasant ache you get off cold metal but because the chances of anything removing my hands from the folded positions in my armpits was sodding slim. I went on to wonder...how do they do Parkour in Russia?! which led me to wonder further still....why can't folk like PK Gen stop spreading the love in other cold places like Russia and for that matter Finland and Canada and get to work on some holiday destination communities (Brazil is too far)..PK camp Morrocco please....Bootcamp Egypt....etc.....

Wingeing aside, I had some warm fronts in my heart recently as I remembered that (apart from the sadist instructors:.)) the PK comunity is made up of alot of patient and generous folk with a lot of secret (not to mention overlooked and under used) knowledge that they will happily share to assist your training if you seem in need. Another thing that struck me is how often people have encountered similar problems to the ones I have written about in this blog. It honestly really suprises me to hear someone tell me that they have had the same difficulties as it seems from outside that other folk are progressing along with nothing but enthusiasm and enjoyment.However it seems they may be struggling with more physical or mental demons than one could guess. That's part of the package of problems; they have the potential to make you feel isolated and alone if you believe lets say for example that you are inherently predisposed to be the only one to repeatedly mess up a tic tac.

I was reminded of the solution to Parkour stuggles after conversation with Mr Kong to Couch. After sharing experiences of coming back from broken limbs (his way more serious than mine) the common theme is the necessity to train slowly and systematically. Just as it's a total buzz to master something new, it's a total bum to lose it again either to injury or mind ghosts or even lack of use. You are forced to relearn, and just as everything can be learnt, everything can be relearnt as well. Being systematic by breaking movements down to their consituent parts and addressing where the diffculty lies really pays off and old moves eventually come back. If you think back to when you were a child this is how you first learnt to move, you wriggled on your back and stomach, you rocked, pulled, pushed, slid, reached, crawled, and eventually one day stood....and then things really did start to get interesting. All movement can be categorised as one of more of the following patterns, naval raditation, body half/side to side, body half upper/lower and contralateral and as a baby your curious little form explored each of these patterns mastering one in order to support the next. If you can trace where you are lacking the movement foundation to support a movement (not necesssarily back to infancy although sometimes there can be an issue!)either through strength, flexibility or coordination and then train it, in theory you naturally build a bridge to the next level. I guess its where the truth of the phrase "don't run before you can walk" comes from because even though its thrilling to feel like you made a huge leap but you may never fully realise what you have missed out on along the way.

I still intend to write some stuff about goal setting as I read some useful stuff. Remind me!!!

love to all things that movex

hot tip

ive been ill all week so no training ergo no blogging.
Learnt a cool thing from the physio regarding trying to train chin ups but my wrists and elbows getting knackered very quickly and that is; tape the chin up bar so you have a wider surface to grip releasing some of the tension from the forearms....the same solution that gets applied to a tennis racket when people have tennis elbow.

thats all....going to the PK Gen Jam on Sunday with the focus of enjoying, keeping an open mind, playing and keeping moving.Lets see.

PISS EASY

im corpsing from the reality check of that last post by Sola......regarding find some piss easy moves and have some fun....YOU ARE SO RIGHT!.:.)

Currently most specified Parkour moves have now become scrambled...the paralysis of analysis my teacher used to say when we got tangled up in long dance sequences of 36 counts of 3 with 300 different variations of body shape rather than letting it flow. I literally can't slide monkey...cannot ......brain haemorrhage territory. So Sola; no i wont be doing any slide monkeys, though sadly not through choice:.). The upside of this paralysis is that if this is how effective my brain is when it focuses on crap things imagine what a tool it could be if I could turn it around and harness it for good?!.

The only move i'm enjoying right now is 2ft to 2ft precision between walls. Broke a nice one that was very high for me around Oval on Monday night with much support from Mr Bourne. Apparently he has never seen anyone quite so animated, or indeed acting quite so stangely before a jump. (We aim to please..if someone is going to wait around in the cold for an hour at least you can provide some entertainment:.) The cool thing about the difference between going for a jump and not is a weird shift of perception that my dancer/martial arts/tai chi trained friend pointed out on their first ever PK session.If you push your face forward so that you can't see the rest of your body in your peripheral vision and see the wall you are jumping to flowing toward you I get this feeling (when i'm really focused) that part of me has jumped already and i'm almost supposed when reality snaps back and I find myself still on the first wall. This is opposed to the anxious watching of a wall that is sliding ever further away from you and I now know when that happens there is no way i'm jumping unless i adjust something.

But....as Sola added it is great to move from the perspective that you are blessed to have the body you have as one day you that could all change in an instant and so a good old leapyjumpskipabout with an open mind and a grateful spirit is the best challenge I have ever been posted. Thankyou v.much.

Bad habits.

Training schedule recent weeks:
1 or 2 Outdoor classes a wk
3 Outdoor sessions with friends or alone from 1- 4hrs
Running
Dance and acro classes. (acro is new partly for my job but also for the fear and for the strength)
Hours and hours of lying on tennis balls and stretching and breathing because Im waking up in knots walking like a geriatric.

I'll admit i'm in a training slump at the moment as although i'm moving alot and parkouring every second day I feel (or did feel )disheartened.
I know its not helpful or productive but lets admit it;most of us have had a moment where the thought "i am just so sh*t at this" has crossed their mind. I know I have spoken to a lot of girls about this.....maybe girls are more open about their inscurities or maybe they are more inclined to doubt themselves physical capabilities but either way at the point where you feel you need motivational rescuing what can you do.....??

Finding out where and when the thought arose is quite helpful. In my case it came from making comparisons between my technique and others. Bad habit. BAAAADDD habit. I wonder if all confidence failures come from comparison?. Left alone in a landscape and learning to run, jump and climb either for fun or for survival, comparison would'nt be an issue, progress would still be made and possibly goals made and achieved aswell. Comparing yourself with anyone will always potentially end unfavourably and it seems tempting as comparison (seems) to give you a frame of reference for your progress. However actually it is a distraction that is a waste of time so i'm going to stop doing it. More thoughts on healthy goal setting soon. Im still addressing the pull up challenge although somewhat held back by pretendonitius symptons in my elbows. Hopefully by the end of this week I will have a proper plan of how to train after seeking advice from various professional types with body know how.